Jenny Han’s The Summer I Turned Pretty has spent three seasons on Amazon Prime turning a nostalgic beach read into appointment viewing, and it’s easy to see why: Cousins Beach, the soundtrack, the slow-burn love triangle between Belly Conklin and brothers Conrad and Jeremiah Fisher. But underneath the sun-drenched aesthetic is a show that’s quietly doing a lot of work around how (and how not) to communicate desire, boundaries, and hurt. That makes it worth a closer look through a trauma-informed lens, especially around consent, communication, and the boundaries that hold (or don’t hold) across three seasons of family grief and young love.
The Silence Problem
A lot of the pain in this show doesn’t come from any single bad decision. It comes from what characters don’t say. Conrad spends most of season one carrying the secret of his mother Susannah’s cancer diagnosis alone, and that silence reads to everyone else as moodiness, coldness, even rejection. Belly reads his withdrawal as disinterest in her. The audience knows the truth, but the characters don’t, and that gap is where a lot of the triangle’s tension actually lives.
This pattern repeats itself in bigger ways in season three. Belly and Conrad share a quiet, unresolved moment at Cousins over Christmas that she keeps from Jeremiah. Around the same time, Jeremiah cheats on Belly with a girl named Lacie during a spring break trip to Cabo, something he frames to himself as fair game because the two had a fight and briefly “broke up” before he left. Belly doesn’t see it that way. Both of these secrets sit unspoken for most of the season, and when they finally surface, they surface all at once and do maximum damage: to Belly and Jeremiah’s engagement, to Conrad and Jeremiah’s relationship as brothers, and to Steven’s trust in all three of them once he learns he was the last to know.
This is a useful thing to sit with. Secrecy, even when it comes from a place of trying to protect someone or avoid a hard conversation, tends to create more harm than the information itself would have. Susannah’s choice to keep her illness private, Conrad’s choice to keep it too, Belly and Conrad’s choice to sit on their Christmas moment, Jeremiah’s choice to bury what happened in Cabo: none of these secrets stayed contained. They all eventually forced a reckoning that was harder than an honest conversation would have been in the moment.
Boundaries, or the Lack of Them
If communication is one throughline, boundaries, and how often they get skipped past, is the other. A few moments stand out.
Jeremiah’s response to his own infidelity is to propose marriage. In both the book and the show, this comes right on the heels of the affair, framed as a grand romantic gesture rather than something that follows real accountability or repair. Belly says yes on the spot. It’s a compelling television moment, but it’s also a pretty clean example of a relationship skipping past the boundary-setting and repair work that a betrayal like that would usually call for, replacing it with a bigger commitment instead. The show does eventually let this catch up with the relationship (Belly spends much of the season planning a wedding largely on her own, with Jeremiah checked out and unsure whether he even wants to graduate, let alone get married), but it’s worth naming out loud: an engagement is not an apology, and a ring doesn’t substitute for the harder conversation about what was broken and how it gets rebuilt.
Susannah’s own posthumous letter, revealed on the morning of Belly and Jeremiah’s wedding, is another boundary moment, this time a healthier one. Even from beyond the story, Susannah’s words give Belly permission to slow down and question a decision she’d been moving through on autopilot. It’s a reminder that a boundary can also sound like someone giving you room to change your mind.
There’s also a quieter boundary violation running underneath the parents’ storylines. Adam Fisher, Conrad and Jeremiah’s father, has an affair with his secretary while Susannah is undergoing chemotherapy, a betrayal that shapes how both of his sons relate to trust and commitment for the rest of the series. Meanwhile Laurel and John, Belly’s parents, blur their own boundary after a work conference and a few drinks lead to a hookup, one they’re both still sorting out how to feel about. Neither storyline gets treated as scandalous or played for shock value, but both quietly reinforce a theme the show returns to again and again: what happens when people act on impulse or old feelings without first having the conversation about what’s actually okay.
Consent, Actually Shown Well
One of the more notable choices in the show is how it handles Belly and Conrad’s first time having sex, in the season two episode “Love Scene.” It’s framed with care: it’s mutual, it’s unhurried, and it happens in a context of real emotional intimacy rather than pressure or performance. Creator Jenny Han has spoken about wanting the audience to be present with Belly for that milestone, which is a departure from the books, where Belly stays a virgin. It’s a good example of media modeling an enthusiastic, unpressured yes, which is honestly still rare in teen romance.
That doesn’t mean every relational beat in the show holds up as well. The love triangle format itself, by nature, invites some ambiguity around whether Belly is communicating clearly with either brother about where she stands, and there are stretches, especially through season three, where all three of them are more reactive than direct with each other. That’s realistic for people in their late teens and early twenties figuring things out in real time, but it’s also worth naming when a friend group is watching this with hearts in their eyes.
Grief Rewires How People Show Up
A trauma-informed lens has to make room for the fact that this entire triangle is happening inside a family processing terminal illness and loss. Susannah’s cancer, and later her death, changes how Conrad relates to everyone around him, including Belly. By season three, the show starts to name this more directly than it used to: Conrad is shown in therapy, working through anxiety and grief, and sitting with a therapist ahead of a dedication event for his mother back at Cousins Beach. That’s a meaningful shift for the show, actually depicting the ongoing work of processing loss rather than treating grief as something that resolves after a season or two.
Grief can look like distance, like irritability, like difficulty being emotionally available even to people you love, and like reaching for whatever feels most familiar (in Conrad and Belly’s case, each other) when everything else feels unstable. Understanding that context doesn’t excuse every moment of poor communication or boundary-crossing, but it does help explain it, which is a distinction worth making with anyone processing their own grief alongside a relationship.
Where It Falls Short
The show is at its best when it slows down and lets characters actually talk to each other, and season three’s therapy scenes with Conrad are a good example of that instinct paying off. It’s shakier when misunderstandings and betrayals pile up and get treated as romantic fuel rather than something the characters are actively working through with any real accountability. Jeremiah, in particular, moves from infidelity to proposal to visible checked-out-ness in the relationship without much reflection shown on screen, and the show is more interested in the will-they-won’t-they of Belly and Conrad than in what actual repair would look like after that kind of breach of trust. There’s also a broader pattern across the trilogy where jealousy and triangulation, deliberate or not, get coded as romantic intensity rather than something to examine. Worth a conversation with any younger viewers about the difference between passion and possessiveness, and between a grand gesture and an actual amends.
The Takeaway
The Summer I Turned Pretty isn’t a cautionary tale or a how-to guide, it’s a coming-of-age drama that gets some things about intimacy and consent notably right, while still leaving a lot of room to talk about the cost of secrecy, the difference between a boundary and an ultimatum, and what it actually takes to repair trust after it’s been broken. If you’re watching with a teenager, a friend, or working through your own patterns, it’s a good jumping-off point for exactly those conversations.
Reel Relationships is a series from Our Voice examining media through a trauma-informed lens. Got a show or movie you want us to break down? Let us know.